english - Gazelles

Mastering Growth 7But Carney also likes the impression the sheets leave with visitors.“When you walk somebody around the office and everybody has thisfour-color Top 5 and Top 1 of 5 hanging over their desks, you typicallyget, ‘Wow.’” says Carney. “It sends a clear indication to a client, abanker, or a prospective employee that there’s something differentabout how we do business. It gives them another level of comfort thatwe’re staying focused and doing the right things.”Like many gazelles, Carney’s company drives quarterly prioritieswith a theme. Choosing a space motif, Carney first set a “Launch”theme and introduced it at an all-company event held at TheChallenger Center for Space Science Education. “Our current themeis ‘Escape Velocity,’ because as the organization is growing, we’reescaping the old bonds of how we used to do business. It’s like aspaceship escaping gravity—you’ve got to exert a lot of energy to doit.” Each time the 40-member workforce hits a sales goal, there’s atheme-related celebration, with prizes and recognition.While many companies tend to focus their themes on sales goals,it’s important to focus on other areas of the company as well. “Wetend to pick a non-sales goal in our fourth quarter each year,” saysThe Scooter Store’s Harrison. The practice started when he began tonotice that the sales engine was going full-tilt, but elsewhere in theoperation, “the wheels were falling off.” So Harrison established afuturistic “sy-fi” (systems-finance) theme that identified several criticalareas for improvement—including a call for zero errors anddefects, “which was, at that time, ridiculous.” But it was achievedusing a systematic process of tracking errors, gathering data as to whythey were happening, and then using standard quality-improvementmethods for getting to the root cause and solving the problem.The following year, Harrison defined a “Customer WOW” themethat aimed to have customers saying “wow” whenever they interactedwith the company. Harrison himself created the first wow, by ridingan elephant into the employee kickoff meeting. Harrison setanother demanding task in front of the group, one worthy of a wowif achieved. The goal was to cut back the time it takes to get a disabledcustomer’s malfunctioning wheels fixed. “The industry average isseven days, but that’s seven whole days that these people are immobile,”Harrison says. “We got it down to a day.”Hokey as they may sound, quarterly themes are powerful goalmotivators. They focus the entire workforce on that single, overridingCopyright 2002 © por Verne Harnish